More than four million refugees have fled from Syria, UN says

The flow of refugees is accelerating only 10 months after the agency said more than three million Syrians had fled their country.

More than 4 million Syrians have fled abroad since the 2011 outbreak of civil war, the largest number from any crisis in almost 25 years, the United Nations said Thursday.

A recent wave of people leaving Syria and an update of Turkish statistics confirmed the tragic milestone, according to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR. The agency said 7.6 million additional people have been displaced from their homes within Syria by the fighting.

The 4 million refugees are the most to flee a conflict since the Afghan civil war forced 4.6 million out of their country beginning in 1992.

"This is the biggest refugee population from a single conflict in a generation," UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said. "It is a population that needs the support of the world but is instead living in dire conditions and sinking deeper into poverty."

The flow of refugees is accelerating only 10 months after the agency said more than 3 million Syrians had fled their country.

Turkey has borne much of the impact. In June alone, according to UNHCR, more than 24,000 people arrived from northern Syria amid fighting between the Islamic State group and Kurdish militants. The more than 1.8 million Syrians in Turkey have made it the biggest host of refugees in the world, an expensive undertaking that Turkey is bearing mostly on its own.

"What are we going to be facing in another year's time?" Andrew Harper, the UNHCR chief in Jordan, asked in an interview with The Associated Press.

Harper emphasized that countries involved had to figure out ways to keep the Syrian refugees productive.

"We should make sure that the people who are here, the skills, the work, the ability, are not wasted," Harper said. "We do not want to warehouse the refugee population of four million. Just imagine the amount of productivity they could contribute to an economy."

The dire situation is pushing a wave of Syrian refugees to escape to Western Europe, taking increasingly risky paths across the Mediterranean as European countries resist the flow of migrants and refugees.

"We cannot afford to let them (the refugees) and the communities hosting them slide further into desperation," Guterres said.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to More than four million refugees have fled from Syria, UN says
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2015/0709/More-than-four-million-refugees-have-fled-from-Syria-UN-says
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe